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Friday, November 1, 2013

Sepia Saturday: First Home

Sepia Saturday challenges bloggers to
share family history through old photographs.

This week’s Sepia Saturday prompt is the ancestral home. Oh, if only someone would invent a gadget
that would translate “Beginning
at two red oak saplings on a hill thence east one hundred and ninety-two poles
to a white oak in a glade” into a Google map complete with street view of that
ancestral home! In the meantime, I am
just grateful for a few photos of my parents’ and grandparents’ first homes.

My
maternal grandfather Orvin Owen Davis (1899-1963) grew up on Third Avenue in
Shenandoah, Page County, Virginia. It is
likely he was born in that house too.
This photo of the Davis children with their Sullivan cousins is the only one that I can confidently claim shows the ancestral
home.

By
1920, though, my granddaddy’s daddy Walter Davis moved his family into a “modern”
Sears & Roebuck Craftsman bungalow which he built at 411 Sixth Street. It’s where my grandaunts Violetta and Velma
lived while they were in college and where Granddaddy lived until he married
Lucille Rucker.

Violetta Davis 1924
A low wall has been added
to the front porch

Here
is the house today, still well-kept and loved.
I know that because in the 1970s Walter’s only grandson – my mother’s
brother – bought the house, and my aunt still lives there.

The house Walter Davis built at 411 Sixth St
Look closely and you can see where the fence used to be.

When
my grandparents married in 1923, they moved out of 411 Sixth Street to rent part
of the house across the street. That’s
where my mother was born in 1929. The house shows up in many photos because the Davises seemed to have prefered posing in the front yard.

"C.M." and Violetta 1924
Momma's birthplace in the background

Velma Davis 1924
Momma's birthplace in the background

She
didn’t live there long because her grandfather Walter Davis was a carpenter, a
builder of houses. In fact, many of the
houses in Shenandoah are Walter’s creations.
He and Granddaddy built the house next door at 414 Sixth Street. It became my mother’s childhood home. Apparently the house was built between 1930
and 1935 because in the 1940 census Granddaddy said they lived in the “Same
House” in 1935.

My mother Mary Eleanor Davis about 1934
at her grandparents' home on Sixth St.
Two things to notice: (1) the fence is now gone, and
(2) Momma's childhood home is across the street.

Momma with her Shirley Temple doll and friend.
The retaining wall, brick pillar and fireplace
indicate this is Momma's home at 414 Sixth St.

Today
both the house where Momma was born and the house where she grew up look
cheerful and well-maintained.

412 and 414 Sixth St, Shenandoah, Virginia
Snipped from Google Maps

Meanwhile
across the state in Portsmouth, my dad’s first home was with his maternal
grandmother Mary Theresa Sheehan Killeen Walsh.
The house on the corner of Charleston and Palmer Avenues is barely
recognizable today with its addition of vinyl siding and absence of
landscaping.

But
years ago Daddy remembered it. He even
had the nerve to march up to the front door, knock, and ask the current owner
if he could come in and look around.
(Sounds much like Miranda Lambert’s song “The House That Built Me” –
promising to take only a memory!) But
these are different times, and the only memory Daddy took from there was a
door-slam in the face.

As
you can see, many of those first homes can still be visited, even if only from
the street. However, not all my
ancestral homes were so lucky. The home
of my great-great grandfather James Franklin Jollett hosted the much
anticipated family reunion for many years (although not during MY lifetime). So far I have not found a “full frontal” view
of the house, but pieces of the house can be seen in the background of many
photos giving me a sense of what it was like:
a tall 2-story white clapboard house outlined with an irregular picket
fence; a grape vine arbor shaded a back porch.

51 comments:

This is a great post - I love all of the history. I'm sorry your dad had the door slammed in his face - my dad had a completely different experience at his childhood home. Several years after the house had been sold he knocked on the door and was welcomed inside to see what changes had been made. And now 30 years later, I have found a "new" cousin who lives in the area and knows the people who own the house now. All I need to do is get to the area and I'm inside!

My childhood home was just sold a few weeks ago and we're been told it is going to be featured on a "flip" show on HGTV. I won't even have to knock on the door to see it!

It should be fun to see your house featured on tv although its being a "flip" means it fell into disrepair, I guess. My childhood home was officially "condemned," so that someone could get it cheap and flip it.

The home was beautiful at one time and is in a GREAT neighborhood but yes, it is in disrepair. My parents just never had the energy to fix things and after 55+ years it looked sad and tired. I hope we get to see it all fixed up!

Homes and their ownerships change and the new owners have new ideas that don't always seem better to the original owners. The folks who bought the home I grew up in, tore up the front lawn & planted a mish-mash of easy-care shrubbery in it's place which I think looks awful. They also removed the nice hedge around the bay window & stuck solar panels on the roof & they're not the new less obtrusive kind either. They stick up. And from what they did to the outside, I have no desire to see what they might have done to the inside! But oh well. I live far away now & don't have to see it at all. I like the way you were able to show what your ancestral homes look like today. Isn't Google wonderful. Neat idea using their service that way.

My childhood home doesn't look as good either. We had 2 front entrances. The one we used the most actually went into our den which originally had been a breezeway between the house and garage. Whoever bought it closed off that door and now the sidewalk goes to nowhere. What is worse though is what has become of my grandparents' home next door. Sickening!

I find it amazing, Wendy, that you have so many photos and so much detail about all these homes where your parents and ancestors lived. How wonderful! I have to say I miss all the gingerbread on the remodels of the old homes. I know it went out of fashion, was probably hard to maintain, and may have deteriorated much more quickly than other parts of a home, but still, I think it's beautiful to see. Of course, all the homes look really well maintained so even if the owners took off the gingerbread, at least they're taking care of the homes.

Having lived and loved in many houses, I can relate to your theme, Wendy. Next to the fireplace hearth in my present home is a small wooden barrel that was one of the kegs of nails used to build my grandparents home in 1936. They lived next to the carpenter/builder who built many of the houses on their street. He also made a plant stand as a gift for my grandmother which now lives on our front porch. Small mementos of a handcrafted home like these that will never change in my memory despite a hundred Google photos.

I would love a barrel of nails from an ancestral home. While I'm glad to have my great grandmother's corner cupboard, I LOVE having her canning jars, wooden spoon, and the lifter from her wood stove. Reminders of that real life in day-to-day living are extra special to me.

A wonderful posting of houses and of the people who lived in them. With such a distinctive name, did Orven Owen Davis have Welsh connections? Fascinating to see your "then" and "now" photographs and thank you for the Google tip. I have always had a soft spot for the American "gingerbread" style of houses with verandas. We don't have them here - perhaps because of our weather. It must be good to feel your ancestor is remembered locally through the street named after him. . . .

I do believe the Davises trace back to Wales, but I have not done the due diligence to prove it. What I have found online suggests my granddaddy's great-great-grandfather was Lewis Davis and that he came from Wales. The problem comes with Lewis's son Leonard - just too many Leonard Davises and not enough records to say for sure whether MY Leonard is Lewis's son.

Thank-ya mucho. We should check periodically to see if the Charleston Ave house goes up for sale -- might have interior pictures online. Or we could pretend to be interested buyers ha ha. I wonder which room was Daddy's.

Terrific collection of photos and interesting to see them change. How nice that most have endured and been kept in reasonably good condition. It's always a bit of a shock to see how other people re-decorate your past homes. Sorry to hear about your Dad's experience. A great post - I enjoyed reading it.

What fun, and I must confess I also checked out google again with a few of our old places as well. Your first photo from google maps, wow, how they captured that lovely view with all those clouds and such a rich blue sky. Not to forget your own lovely family photos to treasure as well! Thanks for spectacular tour!

Funny that you noticed how pretty Shenandoah looks on Google. And it really does look like a lovely town. Actually it's a rather struggling town in an economically poor county. But in the early 1900s it was a boom town with the railroad being a major employer.

When I look back at houses we once lived in they all seem incredible small not that our bungalow now is all that large. To see them as they are now on google is something I shall have to try - but one is still within walking distance and that's the one we altered as the children grew up and wanted rooms of their own.

I'm always surprised by front yards. My memories are of huge front yards and the house far from the street. When I go by my childhood home or that of my cousins, I swear they moved the house closer to the road! Where did the yard go??

A great post. Very interesting tour through your family history. That is sad that the new occupants would not allow you Dad to see the home; I know how he must have felt. Today my only childhood home and where Mom lived all her life is owned by a nephew who has never ever invited me to see it when I am back there visiting. A pox on all such people. I use Google sometimes too. Interesting how some old homes survive and live on and others, gone.

Isn't it amazing how much space there is between the houses. These days houses are stamped out so close together that I'm sure you can hear the neighbors all the time. I find it very uncomfortable to be that close with windows facing each other.

Great that so many of the homes are still standing. It's a fascinating subject. Other than Google Maps I've used house sale ads online to see what the houses look like - they have so many indoor and outdoor photos added to the sale ads now.

Good idea -- I have just checked the addresses of some of my distant relatives and ancestors to see if there are any interior photos. So far I found one, but none from the houses featured in this post.

Great post, amazing how you retained all those pictures. I agree with BooBook, real estate ads now include exterior and interior pictures of their listings. ( I happen to know as I work for Remax real estate and am responsible for posting such photos.

Good point about how houses change with us. As we update the decor, we change with the times. I remember when dark kitchen cabinets were considered "dated," but now they're back in. Natural woodwork was dated, so we all painted, and now natural is back in. I've painted more den paneling than I care to think about -- dark paneling can come back if it wants, but that is not a look I plan to return to!

My parents have told me many stories about the homes they grew up in, and I've always wished those houses were still standing so I could visit them. Sadly, they're not. How wonderful though that most of your ancestral homes are!

One of my favorite things to do is to look online at photos of old, abandoned houses. There are some remarkable ones out there. I like to imagine the people who might have lived in them—what their lives might have been like, etc. I'm also fascinated by all those old, empty houses one often sees on the sides of freeways. Oh, how I would love to get inside them! There's so much history there!

I've rambled enough for today. ☺ I hope you're having a lovely weekend.

Your post reminded me of a book that I did for my mother. She, my sister and aunt made the tour (several times) of all of the homes in which my mother and her family lived in Klamath county, Oregon. Such a wonderful time as Mom and my Aunt Loise told stories that they remembered from each house. Your post had much the same feel of belonging to the past through the present.

Great collection of old house photos! What is a flip house exactly? It's not a term used in Australia.My mother was invited into her old childhood home where she was born when she stopped to take a closer look a few years ago, which was really nice. When I noticed the house was up for sale again, I emailed the agent with a few details of my grandparents who had built it back in the 1920s, and she thanked me and said the new owners would be most interested to hear about its history.

Jo, a "flip" is a term we use when a person buys a generally run-down property cheap, fixes it up, and then sells it for a profit with no intentions of actually living there themselves. The idea is to do it quickly, "flip it." Some people make a living at flipping houses. There are tv shows featuring professional "flippers" and their project homes. Typically they have a budget and a deadline of a couple weeks. Of course, the drama is all the structural problems or timing of delivery of new windows or appliances in time for the Open House, all impacting the profit they anticipate earning.

Don't you love being able to revisit the family home today and see that it's still standing? I wish my mom's home was still there, but it's just an open patch of ground now.Did they fancy having their picture in the front of the house because there was only a small backyard, I wonder?

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About Me

My name is Wendy. About twenty years ago, I helped my mother research the Jolletts. Since retiring from teaching, I have expanded my research which I share here. When I’m not looking for my own family, I index for FamilySearch and the Greene County Historical Society.
Welcome to Jollett Etc. Please leave a comment to let me know you were here. If you have more information or believe we are related, EMAIL ME at wendymath at cox dot net